A teenager has been given a suspended sentence for involvement with Randex - a penalty some feel isn't steep enough

A British teenager has been sentenced for his part in writing and distributing the Randex worm which turned infected PCs into 'zombies', controlled by spammers and designed to send out vast quantities of unsolicited email.

The creation of 'bot-nets' has become a prolific weapon in the arsenal of professional spammers and their creation through the distribution of worms and Trojans has become big business for virus writers.

In this case the British teen is believed to have been part of an international gang, based in Canada, Europe and the US. The Randex worm is also thought to be behind a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks which crippled ISPs in October 2003.

The 16-year-old, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was handed a six-month suspended sentence at South Cheshire juvenile court, leading one security expert to suggest he escaped lightly because of his age.

Better way to punish spammers and virus/malware/spyware/trojan writers: Public flogging with slashes of (age of defendant in full years)*(amount of damage in euro's) PLUS sentence of (insert age of defendant here) years... without a possibility of parole. THAT would be a good start! [>:]

I agree [;)]...but in that case...rather start hiding in some hole (maybe Saddam may gave You some clues about best hideouts [8D])...becuase otherwise You will spend many years in Alcatraz...without parole...just paying out debt to community...[:)][:D][8D][;)]